The stock market ended a losing week with light selling as investors grew uneasy about a rising dollar and spiking demand for the safest government debt. After two strong weeks, investors tried unsuccessfully to extend the market's rally after major stock indexes closed at 13-month highs on Tuesday. Disappointing reports on housing and worries about flagging demand at technology companies sapped strength from the market's eight-month rally.

Stocks fell for the third straight day Friday as a disappointing earnings report from computer maker Dell (DELL) weighed on technology shares. The Nasdaq composite index, with a big representation of tech stocks, logged the weakest performance of the major indexes for the week.

With regulators having seized 123 banks so far this year, one might think the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would be looking everywhere to find potential buyers for failed financial institutions' deposits and assets. But there's one place to which they're apparently not quite ready to turn: China.

When San Francisco-based United Commercial Bank failed on Nov. 9, the Fed was weighing an application by Chinese bank Minsheng to step in and take it over. But while it considered whether Chinese regulators were prepared to oversee a bank with operations on both sides of the Pacific, time ran out and UCB was shut down.

Cash-strapped consumers are eating more meals at home and that's slathering J.M. Smucker's (SJM) bottom line in sweet, sticky profits.

The packaged-food maker said Friday that fiscal second-quarter earnings boomed more than 170%, blowing past Wall Street's estimates by 18 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Even more impressive, revenue leaped by 52%.

Smucker may be best known for its eponymous jams and jellies -- other brands include Jif, Hungry Jack, Crisco and Pillsbury -- but it's the Folgers coffee business the company acquired from Procter & Gamble (PG) last year that's jolting growth.

Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone said Thursday that Rupert Murdoch's potential plan to block Google from searching New Corp.'s (NWS) websites is doomed to fail. Murdoch has accused Google (GOOG) of stealing content from his publications, which include The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in the U.S., and The Times and The Sun in the United Kingdom. The cantankerous tycoon said last week that blocking Google could be part of his strategy to get more people to pay for content online.

Here's a young man, all of 35, who runs a company that makes no money, telling an old man, 78, who runs companies that have made billions, that he is wrong. But while it's easy to dismiss Stone's comments as youthful bravado, I think he's giving Murdoch some valuable advice.

My friend has a Tesla Roadster. For those who are unfamiliar with Tesla Motors, the Roadster is the Ferrari of the electric-vehicle world, a high-performance two-seater with more sex appeal than Mae West. How ironic, then, that my friend pines for her old Honda Insight, a dinky little hybrid that has been a commercial failure but remains a cult favorite among the green car set. Why would any sane, hedonistic California resident wish their Ferrari were a Chevy Chevette?

Because the Insight had a wonderful feature that told her how efficiently she was driving. That feature was a light on her dash that glowed green when she was driving smoothly, braking gradually, and accelerating at a moderate piece. It glowed red when she drove like a bat out of hell, braked hard, and turned sharply. While driving her clunky little Insight, her focus was on how to make that light stay green.

A Florida woman on Thursday won a $300 million judgment against Altria Group's (MO) unit Philip Morris USA -- the largest award yet among 8,000 lawsuits filed in the state against tobacco companies. Jurors took three hours to return the award to Cindy Naugle, 61, of Ft. Lauderdale, a former smoker who was given $56.6 million in compensatory damages and $244 million in punitive damages. Philip Morris is responsible for all of the punitive damages and for 90% of the compensatory ones. The jury found Naugle 10% at fault.

Naugle says she started smoking at 20 in 1968 and made repeated attempts to quit, finally succeeding in 1993. Today, she has emphysema, requires a 24-hour oxygen and must travel in a wheelchair.

A reader asks this question: "I stumbled across some information on Vanguard's Web site about what they call the 'Investing Truths.' One of them is about costs and shows that a 1.2% expense ratio would eat up 46% of an 8% return over 50 years. Can that be true?"

The short answer is "yes". Based on a hypothetical investment of $10,000, a fund with an expense ratio of 1.2% would yield $244,322 to the investor and a whopping $210,693 to the fund.

Talk about a rough night. Two Pennsylvania college students were arrested recently for refusing to pay a tip.

According to media reports, Leslie Pope, a senior at Moravian College, and her boyfriend John Wagner, a grad student at Lehigh University, wound up in the back of a squad car after complaining about the lack of service they received at the Lehigh Pub in Bethlehem, Pa. on October 23. They evidently had good reason to complain.

With apologies to Warren Buffett, it's only when the tide comes in that you learn who can swim. With waves of growth on the horizon for the tech sector, it's becoming increasingly apparent that Dell (DELL), the declining PC powerhouse, cannot swim. So maybe it's time for Michael Dell (pictured) to hit the showers. The company's founder returned in January 2007, supposedly to save the company after it spent years adrift. But his performance of late has been so poor that it arguably represents a breach of his fiduciary duty to shareholders. What makes Dell's slide particularly troubling is the apparent strength of other companies in the tech sector, including makers of microchips, personal computers and enterprise servers.

"We think this is a Dell-specific problem," Broadpoint AMTech analyst Brian Marshall said in an interview with CNBC. "They've had some trouble over the last few years guiding their company from a strategic perspective."

Several years ago, when I was doing research for hedge funds, I spent a month talking to Autodesk (ADSK) resellers. Autodesk's AutoCAD software suite is the standard tool used by designers and architects in the construction trade, and it dominates its market much like Adobe's Creative Suite dominates the print, graphic and interactive design fields. Its resellers are the hundreds of consulting organizations and systems integrators that sell Autodesk licenses to customers in the construction business. Like many big software companies, Autodesk relies on a huge reseller channel for the majority of its sales volume.

What my favorite resellers all told me was that they like to play construction-related stocks based on what they see happening at Autodesk, which serves all segments of the construction trade including building, civil engineering, office building design, and factory design.